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RGillig writes "The second MapServer Users Meeting and the first ever Open Source GIS Conference was held on June 9th to 11th in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The initial response from the Open Source GIS community is that the conference was a huge success. It was great to have people from private, government, academia, and communities all together discussing how Open Source GIS applies to their needs. Here is a presentation given by Paul Ramsey, Director, Refractions Research Inc. that outlines the current state-of-the-art for Open Source GIS, and includes links and information about all of the current software packages/efforts, etc."

True though, try asking some random person how many states are in Canada some time. The answers will amuse you. For some other easy questions people seem to miss see: About how long does it take for Earth to orbit the sun? How often do we have a leap year? I think MSNBC did a survey with simmilar questions, I was shocked by the results.

Or how long, to the nearest minute, does it take for the Earth to complete one rotation about its axis?Or how long is a day in terms of rotations of the Earth?Even dictionaries get this wrong [reference.com]:

The 24-hour period during which the earth completes one rotation on its axis.

time for Earth to make a complete rotation on its axis

These definitions are, of course, incorrect; in 24 hours, the Earth completes approx. 1 + 1/365.25 rotations on its axis, and the

I know, its so strange, its not like there's any other Ottawa [ottawa.ks.us] or Ontario [ontario.ca.us] anywhere else in the world. Yep, only ones are in Canada, and while were at it only Americans don't know geography. Any other cliches you want to throw in?

Never assume anything. A large portion of the Canadian population doesn't know that Ottawa is the capital, Toronto is the first choice of many. Canadians don' know any more about geography then anyone else.

If I say "there's going to be a major convention in London", I would assume London, England - not London, Ontario, Canada - and expect others to assume the same.

That depends on your location - having lived in Ohio and Georgia (US, not as in Stalin), someone saying they are going to hold a meeting in London or Rome repectfully would not necessarily immediately mean a flight across the pond.

I live in Ottawa and never heard about it. Hmm. Maybe it was due to the fact that the two big summer events that anyone talked about here were the Hope beach volleyball tournament (today) and Bluesfest (which started yesterday).

Many of you may have forgotten that GMT (generic mapping tool) is open source and predates linux. I'm glad to see more opensource work in the GIS field, as many companies charge bundles of cash for very basic GIS software.

Outside of the end-user type applications (ESRI's ArcGIS and co.), open source in GIS is quite widespread.

Refractions Research maintains the PostGIS module for PostgreSQL, and while it is not yet complete (fix the ACROSS function guys!) it certainly makes the wrangling of data much easier as it implements the OpenGIS SQL specification.

Compare this to the old days of a dozen different formats which weren't convertable, it's much nicer with GML (Geographic Markup Language) and standard representations of geographic features made possible by the find folks involved in the OpenGIS consortium.

Props to the team at the University of Minnesota for MapServer, it's made my life a whole lot easier.

Click on Current Weather to see the MapServer-based map I helped create initially. It's all built with open-source software and (I think) freely available data from the national weather service. It's amazing how much data you get, and how easily it can be handled by one little machine in a windowless office somewhere (until it's slashdotted of course).

Just want to say that Refractions Research's postgis mailinglist is one of the best customer support experiences I've ever had. A prototype of one of our future products (crime mapping software) is based on PostGIS, and 4am the night before a customer demo we were having some problems (postgres optimizer on geom indexes).

By 4:30 AM we had exchanged about 3 emails each way, fixed all the problems and had a great demo. If we land the client, we're hiring them.

Indeed. I was glad to read of JUMP in this report because I was looking for something along the lines of ARCView for occasional use and had been very frustrated with GRASS. GRASS may be extremely powerful and flexible for geographers etc, but for occasional analysis (by non-experts) it really sucks. JUMP looks to be just the ticket.

I'm on the JUMP development team and I hope it meets your needs. It's a good program for editing 10MB shapefiles. It can also edit GML, though not as easily. And it has a simple Java plugin system, so you can make it understand any data format (or database) (or do anything for that matter).

Feel free to contact me or to sign up on the mailing list for the JUMP Unified Mapping Platform.

It's not exactly much of an endorsement for OSS if you use proprietary formats to distribute that endorsement.

I really wish people would stop pretending that simply because openoffice reads docs is some valid justification for using the format. For one, there is nothing you can put in a doc you can't put in an open format, and most of what is put in a doc should be put in an rtf or txt file.

For another, there is no guarantee MS won't change the doc format tomorrow, which is

MOST programmers work inhouse or for custom development firms which can make as much or more money by using open source software (reduction in development time, cuts expenses licensing 3rd party libraries, the don't have to pay MS for information about API's etc, in many cases others will do most of the work to maintain the project).

So, what, they were supposed to put it in an.sxi people without Open Office (read: almost everyone that has a computer, certainly most their audience) can't read it? Supporting open source doesn't mean everything you do needs to be open source. Because I work with apache, and advocate it over IIS, doesn't mean I'm going to chuck Dreamweaver and Photoshop, or not deal with.psd files.

Just because the format is open doesn't mean its the best solution. I'd say they should have made a pdf, but thats just m

As I've said elsewhere, pdf is well documented, by Adobe. While not open source developed, it is at least an open format.

10yrs from now, you'll still be able to read a pdf in your application of choice.

The.doc format is entirely closed and has been reverse engineered. Microsoft has been known to change it. Since the current incarnation has been reverse engineered it's a safe bet that Microsoft WILL change it again.

The "briefing" has a good collection of pointers to open-source applications out there. But as a fan of the commercial Windows GIS product MapInfo, I am frustrated by the lack of an open source alternative, and by the lack of comparable tools for Linux. GRASS is pretty powerful, but it's not something anybody can just start using; it's more like something a Unix GIS professional (difficult but powerful systems like ESRIs) would find interesting.

This note from the briefing is most telling:

Note: The saturated commercial market for cartography tools, the high level of effort to achieve a usable tools, and the appeal of other cutting edge projects have combined to deter any active development on user-friendly paper map production tools. As with the OpenOffice experience in Linux, it would probably require a dedicated multi-year funded project to produce a core product with sufficient technical mass that an open source community could reasonably continue with enhancements and support.

In other words, don't expect to find a complete open source end-user application within your lifetime.

This is, alas, common in the open source world. Everybody does their own toolkit that does 90% of what other toolkits do, adds 10% of its own, and assumes that the user is a person who gets their jollies from writing code, not actually using the application with production data.

> In other words, don't expect to find a complete> open source end-user application within your> lifetime.

The comment you quoted addresses the specific topic of cartographic map generation suitable for printing. I don't see any reason that several of the existing projects can't include respectible map production suitable for most GIS end users.

Furthermore, as noted, a serious cartographic production system could be implemented within a couple of years given an appropriate project to drive it.

GRASS is pretty powerful, but it's not something anybody can just start using; it's more like something a Unix GIS professional (difficult but powerful systems like ESRIs) would find interesting.

That's very interesting! I was wondering if you could give me some advice...?

This is the situatation: I'm looking at GIS now, as I need to expand my skills, and only solutions running on Linux will come under consideration. Furthermore, I wouldn't trust systems where I can't inspect the source code. It doesn

I couldn't tell you what the learning curve of GRASS is like -- it's so steep up front that I've never been able to get anywhere. I've installed it, but even using the Tcl menus, I haven't been able to really use it. I think it takes having an expert sitting next to me showing me what to do. I don't have such an expert here.

To be sure, I did have such help to get started in MapInfo, but once I got the hang of it (quickly), the learning curve for most things was not too bad. Although it is rather sloppy

Thanks for the response! As an experienced user, would you advocate that Debian should go for 5.3 or even 5.7 in Sarge? It seems a bit too conservative to me to go for this very old version, especially when it has critical bugs in import functions... If so, perhaps you could file a bug about that...?

What we need are good royalty and free-use datasets that allow open source products to actually be able to do high resolution GIS queries. Without a large volume of free data, having an open source GIS system isn't enough.

As an undergrad researcher currently doin a heavily GIS-intensive project, i have to say the data is out there. In the US, the USGS provides multitudes of data for free, as does the EPA (the BASINS dataset is HUGE and completely free). Granted, it's hard as fuck to track down if you don't know someone who has already had to sift through the many, many websites out there that hold the data - but it's out there. What needs to be done, I think, is for the community to create some kind of central portal that makes it easy to find, and then download all of the data. THAT would be helpful.

You can still get USGS DEMS at the GIS Data Depot [gisdatadepot.com].
Originally all the data there was free, but little by little they've been fencing it off into the paid "premium" area. But DEMs are still free to download.

I don't know about fire data, but IIRC, DEM data was the first dataset available on the National Map, and SRTM was added recently. AFAIK, it's all free in small enough chunks. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Again, IIRC, hydrography DLG vector data is available through older USGS sources if not the National Map.

I should have provided an easier link [usgs.gov] straight to the downloadable stuff. I believe they are adding DOQ data currently. The DLG hydrography data should be available free (from other USGS sources) in SDTS format. You have to find a conversion utility, which is a pain, but it's free in that (non)format. HTH.

heh. I do my work on campus in my office there. Today being saturday, and it being night time, i'm not on campus in my office, and thus do not have the links on hand. Google for USGS DEM and you'll find plenty of starting points.

There is at least the SRTM-3 data set [nasa.gov]. It is an excellent data set covering most of the landmass between 60 N and 58 S (which, unfortunately just barely includes me...). It has a spatial resolution of about 90 meters and an elevation resolution of about 15 meters.

It's in a simple binary matrix, easy enough to hack up something to import it whereever you want.

I work for the Georgia (USA) GIS data clearinghouse. We have thousands of free datasets, and very reasonable pricing on downloadable imagery ($5 per USGS quarter-quad). Of course the imagery is kind of old (most recent is 1999 color infrared), but many people still find it useful. You do have to sign up, but believe me, it's not for any sinister purpose. There's only two people with direct access to the data; me and the guy in the office next to me. We don't do anything with it but collect aggregate st

Back in the summer of 2001 I used GRASS [grass.itc.it] pretty extensively. At the time, it could do a lot of the same stuff as ArcView and ArcGIS but was vastly clunkier in doing it. Think Gimp vs. Photoshop a few years ago. I'm glad to see that open source GIS lives on, since a workable alternative to ArcGIS is absolutely essential for those of us in academia. In fact, I've given up on ArcGIS and still use ArcView because I can't stand the damn thing. It also doesn't help that you can't run ArcGIS under anything OS but Windows, since its all written in VB. I've even tried to run ArcGIS under Windows via VMWare, but it doesn't recognize the necessary hardware key. Enough with rant there, but in any case I guess I'm just hoping that one of these open source alternatives will be viable in the near future.

Actually, after my last post I took the time to explore the ESRI website as you suggested. Please let me know if I'm mistaken, but it looks like the server products (ie ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS, etc.) run under various *nixes but the desktop products (ArcExplorer, etc.) do not. AV 3.x, of course, runs on a variety of platforms as does ArcInfo 7.x.

ArcGIS 8 was a ground-up re-write as COM/DCOM and is unlikely to ever run under unices. ArcINFO is more or less a "legacy" app and is bundled with ArcGIS, and it runs under just about any command line (except Linux), it is *nothing* like ArcGIS. ArcGIS 9 adds a bunch of missing capability (like a sane macro language) and goes a long way towards making it a "real" GIS, for example, the default macro language is Python, and you can script in whatever language you want, they have also fixed a bunch of other bi

ESRI hasn't truly ported all of ArcGIS to *NIX platforms and I'm not sure that they will. ArcGIS uses COM for it's ArcObjects (which is what ArcGIS and several of the other offerings from ESRI are built on) and for ArcIMS they have included a COM application for use on UNIX systems to provide limited ArcGIS support (sort of like their "ArcMap Server for ArcIMS" that was only available for ArcIMS 4.x on MS Win32 platforms).

I have been using ESRI products since ArcInfo 6.1 (used on DEC Ultrix back in earl

I'll have to check it out a bit more but my initial review shows that it does not impliment the WFS Transactional (WFS-T) which I'll need. I'll have to see where they are with WFS-T and maybe my group can develop the code for it. We've already implimented our own internal WFS-T, but it's to an older specification (along with some "short cuts") and I don't think we were looking to maintain it regularly. Maybe we can at a minimum donate some code, but need to check with the managers to see if the company w

Thanks for the update. Last time I had checked DeeGree [sourceforge.net] they didn't have the WFS-T capabilities. The WFS-T capabilities appear to be fairly new as of April 2004 so I guess I'll be evaluating it again.

I use and upload information into WiGLE (wigle.net), and having information like this would do wonders in having accuracy in mapping and plotting. There ahve been times where I've plotted information, but the information from Tiger isn't up to date, so my plots don't look like they're on roads.

Now, if we could only work on GPS accuracy. Sure, 21 feet is 21 feet, but, still...I'd love to be able to wardrive and know exactly where something is at. (Yes, for the subtle, I know that 21 feet doesn't make much of a difference with a Wi-Fi point, but, being able to accurately identify where a point is would be nice. Instead of knowing where on Randall Road something is, it'd be the bomb if we could pick up something like 4033 Randall Road from the GPS Coordinates.)

Maybe I'm just dreaming, or had one too many to drink on a Saturday night.

WiGLE.net is a submission-based catalog of wireless networks. Submissions aren not paired with actualy people; rather name/password identities which people use to associate their data. It's basically a "gee isn't this neat" engine for learning about the spread of wireless computer usage.

WiGLE concerns itself entirely with 802.11b networks right now, since it's REALLY hard to deal with cellular networks, 802.11a is so hard to catch, and eve

right now, what Canada needs is free access to high-quality current GIS data. The US has Tiger, we have nothing similar.It's all controlled by municipalities. Toronto wants a smallfortune for copies of TAXPAYER paid-for data.

Yes, the lack of free geodata outside of the U.S. is a major problem for us at the FlightGear [flightgear.org] project. This is one area where the rest of the world (I'm Canadian) needs to emulate the U.S. rather than making fun of it.

In fact, not only does the U.S. make its own geodata available for free, but it provides nearly all of the available free geodata for the rest of the world as well, though at a lower resolution. We use the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) 3 arcsecond for worldwide elevations, the 1:

You are so right. I think there are two reasons for that. First, the knowledge of positions has been and is somewhat still considered a military secret.
Many mapping agencies (all?) come from a military background, so they are naturally reluctant to reveal the data. Second, they are making loads of green by selling the information to professionals who need them (e.g. surveyors).

I think you're right. I've noticed this, too, and I'm perversely amused by it, as it's exactly the reverse of the way things USUALLY seem to be stated (i.e. normally it's "We European types get free service from The Government(tm), whereas you Yanks have your Government(tm) selling out to rich corporations!"... I suppose a study of the sociological forces at work in this isolated role-reversal would be kind of interesting - any sociologists/political scientists out there looking for a thesis topic?...)

As much as I'd love to see ESRI relinquish its stranglehold on the end-user map-making world, I don't think I'll see a good, open source alternative for a _long_ time.

I've worked for one of the largest regional planning agencies in the country, for a ~100,000 person city, with planners and environmental types at at U of Michigan, and done a fair bit of GIS work on my own. ~95% of that work has been with ESRI products. Except for some specialized spatial statistics software, and equally specialized transportation modeling packages, ESRIs stuff is (sadly) hard to beat.

The (paying, non-researcher) end-user, a GIS lackey in a planning office somewhere, someone doing work for some environmental group or maybe someone doing marketing analysis, is not going to deal with the hassles that most open source packages involve. The most successful open-source end-user programs tend to be things with a _huge_ amount of interest in them. You know, web browsers, mail clients, desktop publishing, etc. GIS is still kind of a niche market. Maybe I'm totally off-base in assuming this, but my feeling is that ESRIs core customers are the big metropolitan planning organizations and those are _incredibly_ slow moving organizations for the most part. IMO, there has to be a lot of oomph behind a project before it gets polished enough that Joe Blow, Metropolitan Planner, is going to use it.

I love the idea of GRASS, but I don't see it ever out-doing ArcGIS. Open-source GIS needs to find a big, untapped market and branch out from there. I think what the open source GIS community needs to do is focus on a very stripped down package, as easy to use as a web browser, that lets the average person download TIGER line files from census, import ESRI shapefiles, add their own GPS data, with a big open source library of maps for people to play with. Leave out the analysis tools altogether, deal with things like map projection behind the scenes, and let people use GIS to plan gardens around their house, etc. Once you've got people using that, bloat the software from there, rather than slowly adding features to an already buggy, difficult to use package.

The other extreme of the spectrum is the high-end GIS work, where you've already got serious computer nerds working, and where there's always a market for a product that cedes some control back to the user, even if it is at the expense of some day-to-day usability. Thats where open source is already making inroads.

GRASS can *do* all that stuff. It's just that ordinary mortals can't get GRASS to do it. The basic code underneath GRASS seems to be perfectly functional. It just needs to had a good user interface written from scratch, and then have the various GRASS mechanisms put underneath it.-russ

Yes, so it doesn't take long to discover that there is a mountain of data available for free here in the US. The problem is GETTING the data. What a nightmare. The DataDepot is truely a hideous system. And ArcWeb (or what ever their web map server thing is) is totally frustrating to all but the most patient. Data comes from 10000 sources in 100's of formats and require a different way to get each one. Please don't make me separately click to download the 50 different files just to make a basemap of a new field area.

I've triend to make an effort to show how to do this, but it gets frustrating! You can see what I did here at my Visualization Classes [schwehr.org]. I used to be a Arc/Info hardcore user, but got so frustrated I gave up. It's easier for a programmer to write their own than deal with all the cruft in Arc. However, it's great for creating funny war stories.

So, we've got all this wonderful open source GIS software, but no open source GPS navigation software that takes advantage of it unfortunately. It's like the open source GIS stuff is so complex and geared towards GIS applications, that it's next to impossible to make it do anything else like draw simple road maps.

That's silly, everyone knows that REAL open-source geeks read road maps directly from the source code [census.gov], not some wussy precompiled map! (That is, if census.gov gets its act together - for some reason I can't get to this page at the moment. Probably running some proprietary OS or something...)

Seriously though - there are two open-source "road map"-type programs that I know of...

GPSDrive, yes, I figured someone would bring this one up. I have used it a little in the car in testing from time to time. It does work marginally well by being able to show you where you are on top of pre-rendered maps; however, since it doesn't have any ability to access the low level data that was used to create these maps it can't even do something simple like figure out what street you are driving on (note the difference between showing you a map that shows your location moving down main street vs prin

I was following xcar while it was still on the mp3car boards, but had not looked at it in quite a while. I switched over to linux for my carpc a few months ago, and am writing my own interface in OpenGL with perl. I'm not terribly great at C++ which is why I haven't really been that interested in xcar..

I have hopes to write a Garmin StreetPilot emulator to deal with navigation at some point.. unfortunatly, it's going to be probalby October before I'll have any time for a big side-project like this:(